A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as the Boneless Wonder. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury bench.’ There have been several circus or fairground attractions with this bill matter. The specific one may be that of ‘Valentine’, who died in 1907.
Boney will get you! A curiously enduring threat. Although Napoleon died in 1821 (and all possibility of invasion had evaporated long before that), it was still being made to children in the early 20th century. In 1985, the actor Sir Anthony Quayle recalled it from his youth and, in 1990, John Julius Norwich remembered the husband of his nanny (from Grantham) saying it to him in the 1930s. He added: ‘And a Mexican friend of mine told me that when she was a little girl her nanny or mother or whoever it was used to say, “Il Drake will get you” – and that was Sir Francis Drake!’
(the) bonfire of the vanities The title of Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities is derived from Savonarola’s ‘burning of the vanities’ at Florence in 1497. The religious reformer – ‘the puritan of Catholicism’ – enacted various laws for the restraint of vice and folly. Gambling was prohibited, and Savonarola’s followers helped people burn their costly ornaments and extravagant clothes.
(to cast/throw one’s) bonnet over the windmill To act unrestrainedly and defiantly; to throw caution to the winds. This is a translation of the French expression ‘jeter son bonnet par-dessus les moulins’ that had entered the English language by 1885 as ‘flung his cap over the windmill’. According to Valerie Grove, Dear Dodie (1996), when Dodie Smith entitled one of her plays Bonnet Over the Windmill (in 1937), ‘she enlisted Sir Ambrose Heal’s help in establishing where the expression…came from.’ A London University professor ‘reported that the phrase…was originally a lazy way of finishing off a story for children.’
book See ANOTHER PAGE; EVERYONE HAS ONE.
book ‘em, Danno! A stock phrase from the American TV series Hawaii Five-O (1968–80). On making an arrest, Detective Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) would say to Detective ‘Danno’ Williams (James MacArthur), ‘Book ‘em, Danno!’ – adding ‘Murder One’ if the crime required that charge.
boom, boom! Verbal underlining to the punchline of a gag. Comedian Ernie Wise commented (1979) that it was like the drum-thud or trumpet-sting used, particularly by American entertainers, to point a joke. Music-hall star Billy Bennett (1887–1942) may have been the first to use this device, in the UK, to emphasize his comic couplets. Morecambe and Wise, Basil Brush (the fox puppet on British TV), and many others, took it up later. ‘Boom boom’ has also been used as a slang/lingua franca expression for sexual intercourse, especially by Americans in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War.
(a) boon companion Literally, ‘a good fellow’ and used originally in a jovial bacchanalian sense. Now only used in a consciously archaic manner and referring to a close companion of either sex. ‘With such boon companions Pepys loved to broach a vessel of ale and be merry’ – Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Man in the Making, Chap. 5 (1933); ‘Only after Saudi pressure, it is said, did the president relent and two months ago allow Rifaat to return from six months in exile. The Saudi crown prince, Abdullah, is a brother-in-law and boon companion of Rifaat, and the Saudis like Rifaat’s pro-western views’ – The Economist (26 January 1985).
boop-boop-a-doop This phrase originated in the Kalmar/Stothart/Ruby song ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’, sung by the ‘Boop Boop a Doop’ girl, Helen Kane, in a 1928 musical. Then ‘Betty Boop’ became a cartoon character – sexy, baby-faced, baby-voiced – in Max Fleischer cinema cartoons of the 1930s. Marilyn Monroe sang the song in the film Some Like It Hot (US 1959). More recently there was a British pop singer who called herself ‘Betty Boo’.
boots See BIG FOR ONE’S; DIE WITH ONE’S; HE CAN LEAVE.
border See BREAK FOR THE.
bored! Jo Ann Worley used to exclaim this loudly on NBC TV, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (1967–73). Could this be connected with ‘bor-ring!’ said by people in a sonorous, two-note sing-song way at about this time?
bored stiff Meaning, ‘extremely bored’ (possibly a pun on ‘stiff as a board’). Known by 1918, according to the OED2, which is unable to find citations for any of the various boredom phrases before the 20th century: ‘bored rigid’ (earliest citation 1972), ‘bored to death’ (1966), ‘bored to hell’ (1962), ‘(to) bore the pants off’ (1958) and ‘crashing bore’ (1928). There are no citations at all for ‘bored to tears’, ’bored out of one’s mind/skull’, or ’bored to distraction’. What does this have to tell us – that before the 20th century there was no expectation that you shouldn’t be bored? Or were the Victorians so bored that they couldn’t even be bothered to find words for it? Either way, there are one or two relatively new arrivals in the field. To say that something is ‘as exciting as watching paint dry’, though popular, does not seem very old. The earliest citation to hand is of a graffito from 1981, which stated that ‘Living in Croydon is about as exciting as watching paint dry’. As for ‘boring as a wet weekend in Wigan’, referring to the town in the northwest of England, the earliest use found is in the Today newspaper for 16 July 1991. As so often, alliteration is the main force behind this piece of phrase-making. ‘Wet weekends’ have long been abhorred, but Wigan appears to have been tacked on because it has a downbeat sound, it alliterates and because people recall the old music-hall joke about there being a WIGAN PIER.
born-again Applied to evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the Southern USA since the 1960s, this adjective derives from the story of Jesus Christ and Nicodemus in John 3 (‘Ye must be born again’). Originally suggesting a re-conversion or first conversion to Christianity, this adjectival phrase took on a figurative sense of ‘re-vitalized’, ‘zealous’, ‘newly converted’ around the time when Jimmy Carter, from a born-again Baptist background in the South, was running for the US presidency in 1976. Carter said in an interview with Robert L. Turner (16 March 1976): ‘We believe that the first time we’re born, as children, it’s human life given to us; and when we accept Jesus as our Saviour, it’s a new life. That’s what “born again” means.’ Hence, usages like ‘born-again automobiles’ (for reconditioned ones) and such like.
born 1820 – still going strong Johnnie Walker whisky has used this advertising line since 1910. There was a John Walker but he was not born in 1820 – that was the year he set up a grocery, wine and spirit business in Kilmarnock. In 1908, Sir Alexander Walker decided to incorporate a portrait of his grandfather in the firm’s advertising. Tom Browne, a commercial artist, was commissioned to draw the firm’s founder as he might have appeared in 1820. Lord Stevenson, a colleague of Sir Alexander, scribbled the phrase ‘Johnnie Walker, born 1820 – still going strong’ alongside the artist’s sketch of a striding, cheerful Regency figure. It has been in use ever since. From Randolph Quirk, Style and Communication in the English Language (1983): ‘English lexicography knocks Johnnie Walker into a tricuspidal fedora. Over four hundred years, and going stronger than ever.’
bosom See ABRAHAM’S.
boss, boss, sumpin’ terrible’s happened! From the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). Spoken in a gangster drawl by Sam Scram (Sydney Keith), Tommy Handley’s henchman.
(the) Boston Strangler Nickname of Albert de Salvo, who strangled thirteen women during 1962–4 in the Boston, Mass., area. Not forgotten, the man’s reputation led to the creation of a joke format: from Today (24 May 1987), ‘Liberal David Steel said earlier this year: “Mrs Thatcher seems to have